Black and White

Shadows from an old Paris lift projected onto the stairwell wall

Black and white photography is enjoying something of a renaissance in the digital age. In thefilm days - and we’re not talking about THAT long ago here - you shot in either colour or black and white and were stuck with it. Yes, it was possible to make black and white prints from colour negatives in the darkroom but the tones had a tendency to come out a bit funny unless you used a specific type of enlarging paper and that needed a certain safelight. It was all too much of a bother for most folk.

This Paris stairway benefits from conversion from a colour file to black and white and then digital “toning” which introduces the warm brown effect.

A section of the web-like arches that span the piers at the Eiffel Tower

Now, everyone with a digital camera has the potential to convert their photographs to black and white at the click of a mouse. Camera magazines routinely have features about monochrome photography with the main topic of discussion often centering around the best way of going from a colour file to a black and white one.

Above and below: The use of black and white almost always gives photographs a more documentary feel. It might not be ideal for photographing some Parisian gardens in full bloom but it can be effective when used in the urban environment.

Of course, there are still lots of traditionalists doing it the hard way - and I’m one of them. Sometimes you just can’t beat film. For street photography, a 35mm rangefinder camera loaded with Kodak Tri-X still takes some beating. And when it’s late in the day, that same film can be rated at ISO 1250 and used for shooting when the light’s fading or even once it’s dark.

Paris lends itself particularly well to black and white. The city is bathed in a lovely light early in the morning and late in the afternoon that casts long shadows, bring out the textures in stonework and throws centuries old facades into the kind of sharp relief that black and white almost demands. Without colour to fall back on, monochrome depends on this interplay of light and shade for contrast and to impart a feeling of 3D to a scene.

This photograph has been heavily breathed on in Photoshop. The cast iron framework of the Eiffel Tower has been converted to black and white and then a duplicate layer made. This layer was given a heavy Gaussian blur with the blend mode set to darken. The effect is to “bleed” the dark parts of the image into the lighter areas.

Most of the buildings are made from a neutral or grey stone so there’s no real advantage in colour in that regard. And if street photography is your thing, the great masters who made their name in the City of Light all worked in monochrome, long after the introduction of colour materials so you’ll be in good company.

This picture of shadows cast by ornate lift doors was taken in the same hotel as the first photograph of the stairwell. Sometimes you don’t have to venture too far to find interesting subjects for black and white photography.

The easiest way to get black and white photographs from your digital camera is simply to request them when you plug your memory card in at your local processing shop to order a set of prints. However, this leaves you with no control over that key issue mentioned earlier of converting a colour file to a monochrome one. There are scores - possibly hundreds - of ways of achieving this conversion in your image processing software. Most of the time, you’re trying to get the conversion to look the way it would had the picture been taken with black and white film - another one of life’s little ironies!

Here are some of the more popular and effective conversion routines that can be carried out in Adobe Photoshop:

Channel Mixer
This tool allows you to control the precise mix of the three colour channels (red, green and blue) that will be used in the conversion to monochrome. It’s one of the most powerful methods and enables the photographer to mimic the effects of the colour contrast filters - such as red, yellow and orange - that film photographers use to alter greyscale tones. In the same way that a red filter over the lens will darken a blue sky so that it records almost as black in the photograph, increasing the red channel input and decreasing the blue will achieve much the same thing in image processing.

In Adobe Photoshop, you access the channel mixer by clicking on Image > Adjustments > Channel Mixer. A dialogue box will pop open showing the red, green and blue channel sliders and a little box near the bottom which says Monochrome. The first thing to do is check this box. This will turn your on-screen image to greyscale so that the changes arising from any adjustments you make to the sliders can be seen.

Play around with the sliders and notice how changes in the percentages alter tones of the same colour in your photograph. Bear in mind that the three percentages have to add up to 100% or thereabouts. For instance, if the red channel is at +40, the green at +70 then the blue should be around -10%. If the percentages add up to more than 100%, the image will be lighted overall and darkened if less than 100%. (Photoshop CS3 does this calculation automatically for you).

A good place to start is with the red set at about 35%, the green at 55% and the blue at 10% but feel free to experiment until you arrive at a conversion you like.

Using the Lightness Channel in Lab Mode
This is regarded as a way of producing high quality files, since its omits the colour information channels in which a lot of digital noise rests in the conversion, and is based on the brightness value of each red, green and blue pixel in the image.

Go to Image > Mode > Lab Colour. Then call up the Channels window if it isn’t already on screen. Here, you’ll be presented with four channels: Lab, Lightness, a and b. Delete a and b by dragging them to the wastebin. That will leave you with just the lightness channel which might require some levels adjustment to raise the contrast a little.

Gradient Map
This is a straightfoward conversion that I’ve found produces very nice results. First of all, press the letter D to set the foreground/background to black and white. Then click on Image > Adjustment > Gradient Map. When the dialogue box opens, click OK. That’s all there is too it! It produces a much nicer range of tones that a simple greyscale or desaturate conversion.
Hue and Saturation Adjustment Layers
This is an incredibly versatile technique that’s a little more complicated but quick in use once it’s set up. Create two hue/saturation layers by going Layers > New Adjustment Layer > Hue/Saturation. On your layers palette, these two new windows will be named Hue/Saturation 1 and 2. On the uppermost of these two layers, set the blending mode to colour and set the saturation to its minimum of -100.

On the bottom of the two, change the Hue slider to dial in any of the colours in the spectrum. Moving this slider from one side to the other is like having a filter for every colour of the rainbow on your lens when using a black and white film.

The only thing I’ve found after doing a conversion is that sometimes the image doesn’t have enough “punch”, it’s lacking a little contrast. Fortunately, there’s a simple and effective way of sorting that out. After conversion, flatten the image (Layers > Flatten Image) and then click ctrl J. That creates a duplicate layer. Then, click on the blending modes in the layers palette and choose soft light if your need a little contrast boost and linear light if you need a lot. Linear light will almost certainly make the image far too contrasty but you can dial in as much as you need, in both blending modes, by using the opacity slider.

Copyright © 2008 Paris Travelogue

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